“The Tour is the only race that matters. And that’s gone now”: Ned Boulting on the end of free-to-air Tour de France coverage in the UK and his “deep sense of loss”

From 2026, the familiar sights of the Tour de France – the epic mountain ranges, fields of sunflowers, Tadej Pogačar riding off into the distance – will remain the same. But for many cycling fans in the UK, the sounds will be very different.

Next year’s Tour, the 25th edition of the race to be shown live on ITV, will be the final one to be broadcast on free-to-air television in the UK (for the foreseeable future at least), after it was announced last week that Warner Bros. Discovery and Eurosport have agreed a new exclusive TV rights deal for cycling’s biggest race from 2026 onwards.

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That deal means that the Tour will disappear from ‘regular’ programming in the UK for the first time since 1984, when Channel 4 (and its iconic Pete Shelley-penned theme) introduced an entire generation of fans to the vibrant technicolour and drama of the race, as well as the culture, history, and geography that accompanies the peloton around France.

 (A.S.O. Pauline Ballet)

Gone too, will be the by now iconic 7pm highlights package on ITV4, fronted by Gary Imlach and watched with wonder by Tom Pidcock and countless others as they stretched the limits of their summer bedtimes, with its carefully told narrative of the race and colourful asides, reminding viewers that the Tour de France is much more than a simple bike race.

For Ned Boulting, who’s been along for the ride with ITV throughout almost the entirety of its quarter-of-a-century association with the Tour, the 2025 race will mark the end of a long, meaningful journey.

“Not enough of us cared”

Speaking to the road.cc Podcast this week, ITV’s lead cycling commentator explained that, when the news broke of Eurosport’s exclusive new deal, he found out just like everyone else, on the morning of the fourth show of his brand-new tour, ‘The Marginal Mystery Tour: 1923 and All That’.

“I was very disappointed, but I wasn’t particularly surprised,” Boulting, who joined ITV’s ranks at the Tour in 2003, as a cycling newbie fresh from the football world.

Over a decade later, in 2016, he became the channel’s lead commentator, as he and the freshly retired David Millar replaced the legendary double act of Phil Liggett and the late Paul Sherwen, becoming – in the ears of many fans – the voice of cycling in the UK.

And while he wasn’t aware that ITV’s relationship with the Tour, and his own 22-year association with the race, was about to come to an end on the morning of a show in Horsham, Boulting tells the podcast he was aware the “writing was on the wall”.

> No Tour de France on ITV from 2026 as Eurosport becomes exclusive UK broadcaster

“For the Tour de France, free to air, for very self-evident reasons, has a size of audience that completely eclipses subscription television,” he says. “The comparison is stark – it’s ten to one or something. At the peak of 2012 and the years after that, well over a million people were tuning in.

“And when cycling is watched on a subscription channel, you're talking about tens of thousands. It doesn’t bear comparison, to be honest. Now, that audience peak has dwindled over the years, and kind of returned to a level that is still higher than when I first started in 2003.

“But the problem is the inflation in the cost of television rights, and the Tour de France is no exception to that. So, it’s become less and less affordable for a free-to-air broadcaster like ITV who relies simply on eyeballs watching. There needs to be hundreds of thousands of people watching for it for it to pay for itself. And year on year, that's got harder and harder.”

He continues: “It isn’t well enough understood how modest a sport in the UK cycling is. And I think one of the distorting lenses through which we see it is social media.

“There’s quite a big cycling presence on Twitter, and because there’s a lot of chat, it feels like a big deal, right? It feels like everybody’s watching this. Everybody’s watching Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, aren’t they? And actually, that’s not true, is it?

“It’s just that there’s a small number of people who are watching it and they’re really engaged in it and there’s a lot of chatter amongst them. But step outside of that bubble and nobody’s watching it.

“It’s nobody’s fault. The ASO have a right to monetise their event as they feel fit, and you cannot blame Warner Brothers for wanting exclusivity. That’s their market. It seems quite strange to me that for a long time they were willing or contractually obliged to share the coverage with a much bigger broadcaster. Why would they allow that to persist?

“And from ITV’s perspective, if they’re losing money, they’ve got to get out. So none of these three parties, in my opinion, are to blame. But the primary reason why it’s gone is because not enough of us cared.”

(ASO/Billy Ceusters)

Nevertheless, while general apathy outside the cycling bubble may have contributed to the demise of the Tour on ITV, Boulting admits that the loss of free-to-air coverage – despite organiser ASO’s clear ambition to Netflixify the race – will almost certainly result in the loss of an integral component of the Tour’s future viewership.

“Since the news was announced, obviously my timeline is filled with people surprised and shocked and disappointed by the news,” he says. “And one of the things that people often have expressed is that ‘I stumbled across, I found cycling, I didn’t know anything about it, it came to me’.

“So that visibility – because let’s face it, we’re not talking about cycling, we’re talking about the Tour de France, this standalone race.

“Forget all the other races, they may as well not exist. There’s only one that matters. Obviously, I love all the races in the calendar, but I’m deeply invested in it.

“For the general public, there's only one that matters. And that's gone now. That’s going to go into a place where, in the UK media landscape, you normally find biathlon and hockey.”

“That’s why they’re there”

(A.S.O., Pauline Ballet)

Reflecting on his own experience at the Tour, a race which has defined his career and public life for almost a quarter of a century, Boulting says he will feel a “deep sense of loss” when he shuts off the microphone in Paris next year.

“I think it’s the the sheer span of my association with the race that takes my breath away, and how quickly things that seem very contemporary and very here and now, within the space of a few years turn into almost nostalgia,” he notes.

“When I think back to the various different iterations and styles and presences of the characters in the Tour over the 23, 24, 25 years I’ve been involved – that’s what gives me an enormous sense of affection for the race, and a deep sense of loss that I know that journey has come to an end.

“Because it feels like another world when I think back to the characters who abounded when I began in the race and where we've ended up now, with one of the greatest generation of riders in the entire history of the sport doing their thing at the very highest level.

(ASO/Billy Ceusters)

“But in between that, we’ve had the Armstrong years, the total chaos of the absolute carnage of the EPO years, the advent of Team Sky and their terribly boring domination of the race, Sagan and Alaphilippe and then – without you noticing it, everything changes in increments.

“And before you know it, two or three years have passed and the whole world is different. And I think it’s that sense of the passage of time unfolding through the lens of this particular race that I will miss greatly.”

That feeling – one that often descends into cliché – that the Tour means more than just a huge annual sporting event is, as fate would have it, poignantly felt in Boulting’s ‘Marginal Mystery Tour’, which he is currently taking around the UK.

> Mini Review: Ned Boulting’s Marginal Mystery Tour: 1923 and all that

The show, which Boulting says is unlike any of his previous tours, is a creative and theatrical adaptation of his best-selling book, ‘1923: the mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France obsession’, which chronicled his mid-Covid lockdown acquisition of a two-and-a-half minute long Pathé news reel, which turned out to be a short film of stage four of the 1923 Tour de France.

Like the book, the show emphasises that the 1923 Tour is irrevocably linked to, and a product of, the context in which it took place, in a Europe still bearing the scars of war, teetering towards another disaster, while embracing new cultural, artistic, musical, and philosophical ideas.

For instance, all of the music in the show, Boulting says, was either first composed or performed in 1923, adding to the sense that he’s created a “piece of theatre”.

“It’s a very 21st century attitude to think that sport sits outside of a context,” he says. “Well, in 1923 that wasn’t the case. Every single rider at the 1923 Tour, in one way or another, would have been either injured, bereaved, or displaced by the Great War.

“There was also this massive overlap of interest in the cultural work – Hemingway was obsessed with cycling and he wrote about it. And that is a big cultural difference from where we’ve ended up a hundred and whatever years later.”

And it’s that desire to place cycling within its context that Boulting believes will be most missed by the demise of ITV’s Tour de France coverage.

“It’s a kind of quite poignant coincidence that I am addressing these issues,” he says of his tour.

“And the other thing about my show is it kind of celebrates the institution of the ITV Tour de France coverage. My audience are viewers, that’s how they know me, first and foremost. That’s why they’re there. So they are loyal viewers of the ITV show.

“And they are coming to the theatres in the knowledge that it’s all coming to an end.”

Ned Boulting’s ‘Marginal Mystery Tour: 1923 And All That’ continues until 20 November. Tickets can be found at nedboulting.com/live.

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